Depths

Don’t speak Fans of dungeon-crawling and base-building seem to have something to look forward to. Silent Hope is an action-RPG with roguish ideas and at-home base progression, and it arrives on October 3, 2023. Revealed at today’s Nintendo Direct, Silent Hope stars seven champions trying to save a princess from a prison of her own tears. (That’s a big mood.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDmS6Nk0P50 The goal is to plumb the depths of the abyss, recovering resources and bringing them back to the surface. Then, back…

Search-and-rescue efforts continue for the Titan submersible, an underwater craft that went missing on Sunday with five people onboard during a dive to the shipwrecked remains of the Titanic. The submersible does not seem to be at the water’s surface, because attempts to locate the craft from the air have searched 10,000 square miles of ocean without a glimpse. Sonar buoys did, however, detect underwater banging noises within the search region. Remotely operated diving vehicles have been targeting the location of those…

“Beyond the Sea” is the rarest breed of Black Mirror episode: the kind driven by empathy. Carried by a cast that includes Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Mara, it’s equal parts character study and Twilight Zone creeping horror — a story focused less on the series’ typical social commentary than on three people whose impossible situation leads to an inevitably tragic end.The episode is set in an alternate 1969 where two astronauts are midway through a six-year mission. Although their bodies are stuck in a cramped…

Cyclone Gabrielle has highlighted forestry slash as a problematic aspect of relying on plantation forests to draw down carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere. While we no doubt must prioritize reducing emissions, we will have to find other effective methods of CO₂ removal. This includes protecting and restoring natural carbon sinks. Aotearoa New Zealand is a maritime nation with 94% of the continent of Zealandia…

The deep void beneath Hyrule brings a fresh kind of horror to Zelda The first time I went down into the Depths in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I figured it would be a fairly straightforward experience. I had seen the glimpses of it in pre-release footage, with some lights staving off ever-present darkness, and figured it would be a neat side venture. A curiosity to explore, when my interest fell away from the overworld of sky islands. Boy, was I wrong. The Depths aren’t just another location in Tears of…

Published in the run-up to summer, Emma Cline’s second novel is probably what people mean when they talk about a “beach read”. Whereas her 2016 debut, The Girls, arrived on a tsunami of hype and hazy lyricism, The Guest is the more controlled work of a fine talent maturing on its own terms. Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, it’s a gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.The story even begins on a beach. The ocean is amniotically warm, the sheen of…

Sigmund Freud famously asked “What does a woman want?” and the question has been posed repeatedly across every medium ever since. Now Maxine Mei-Fung Chung re-examines it in the context of 21st-century women’s lives in her new book, a distillation of 15 years’ work as a psychotherapist.Memoirs lifting the lid on the therapeutic process from the analyst’s perspective have become popular in recent years, with Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Philippa Perry’s Couch Fiction the outstanding examples,…

Image via Lionsgate If there’s one aspect within the horror umbrella that is almost guaranteed to be a sure-fire success, it would be the ever-popular slasher sub-genre. One of the reasons the slasher category is such a beaming piece of cinema is due to the traditional tropes that are perfectly implemented — including psychopathic killers, the innocent final girl, and the uncertainty of whether the carnage is truly over or not. And while most horror parodies completely fail to miss the mark, 2011’s The Cabin in…

JWST's unparalleled ability to peer into the shrouded hearts of distant clouds has revealed the elements of biochemistry in the coldest and darkest place we've seen them yet.In a molecular cloud called Chamaeleon I, located over 500 light-years from Earth, data from the telescope has revealed the presence of frozen carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur – elements vital to the formation of atmospheres and molecules such as amino acids, collectively known as CHONS."These elements are important components of…

Illustration of antihelium annihilation in the ALICE detector at CERN as well as in the universe. Credit: ORIGINS Cluster/S. KwaukaNew findings lay the foundation for the search for dark matter.How are galaxies born, and what holds them together? Astronomers assume that dark matter plays an essential role. However, as yet it has not been possible to prove directly that dark matter exists. A research team including Technical University of Munich (TUM) scientists has now measured for the first time the survival rate of…